Open Science Foundation Preprint Services: Advancing Science, Driving Impact, Opening Access, and Saving Money

“We are a cross-disciplinary coalition of academic scholars from across the globe partnering with the non-profit Center for Open Science (COS) to provide open access to academic scholarship through disciplinary preprint servers that host cutting edge, open access scholarship . We partner with COS through OSF Preprints, a service which runs on the Open Science Framework….

For a Fraction of Your Subscription Costs, Your Support Can Sustain the Future of Open Access.

Preprints are a powerful form of open-access scholarship and are a key component of an open and transparent research lifecycle. They are also an exceptional value: we are currently able to provide these services for free to both researchers and readers. We predict that over the next 10 years, the annual hosting costs for our preprint servers will be $250,000 per year; $2.5 million over the next decade. We would love to meet with you and your colleagues to discuss how your institution can support our coalition with an investment towards defraying those costs and building a vital part of the future infrastructure for open science.”

 

Sharing Research Data and Creating Visibility for Your Research Community

“In this webinar, product specialists from the Center for Open Science will discuss the free, open-source software platform Open Science Framework (OSF). We will discuss the suite of features available to researchers and research support staff from the beginning to end of the research and publishing process. We will discuss how to manage and share files, data, data management plans, code, and protocols in one centralized location. We’ll also review how you can easily build customized structures for projects, collaborate with other OSF users, utilize metadata and PIDs, manage privacy and licensing, integrate third party storage, create customized workflows, and build branded, aggregated, or curated pages of projects and registrations.”

New OSF Search Features for Rapid Research Findability and Sharing

“Key to success with open and transparent research is have tools and workflows that enable it across the lifecycle. Over 600,000 researchers utilize over 12 million public registrations, projects, files, and preprints for research planning, management, and sharing. OSF Search is the discovery infrastructure that surfaces all of these public objects so that they can be cited, reused, and reproduced.

OSF Search now provides results for registrations, preprints, projects (and related components), files, and users in one easy to use interface. In each search result, you will find key metadata to help you determine if these are the results you are looking for. There is also a new “Context” section in each result, which will provide a preview of the metadata fields that reference your search term. For example, a search for “climate change” will return all objects with “climate change” in the title, abstract, subjects, registration responses, wiki, contributors, institutions, funders, and copyright holders.

In combination with a variety of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) implemented across the OSF, users and other data consumers can easily discover the content that is relevant to them while moving past results that are not helpful. For example, the funder facet utilizes the funder metadata field on OSF objects, which is powered by the Crossref Funder Registry. For our institutional members, we include their Research Organization Registry (ROR) identifier in the metadata of research shared by their affiliates. That means there is no misidentification or confusion due to a funder or institutional name being spelled differently or with a previous name; the PIDs are permanent and unique to them….”

Increasing Awareness of Open Science at Your Research Institution

“Do you support a research community at an academic institution? We have a software product that can help solve some of your visibility, storage and data needs. We welcome librarians and research administrators to join us for a webinar exploring how OSF Institutions might be a helpful tool for your research community.”

How to Promote the Discoverability of Research at Your Organization

“In this webinar, product specialists from the Center for Open Science (COS) will discuss the free, open-source software platform Open Science Framework (OSF) and the specialized suite of tools that we offer research organizations for more visibility into and support of their community’s open scholarship practices. We welcome research coordinators, funders and research administrators to join us in exploring how OSF Collections might be a helpful tool for your research community. …”

 

DataPipe

“DataPipe serves as a connection between an experiment and the Open Science Framework. To use DataPipe, you will need to use a webhost to get your experiment online (e.g., GitHub Pages) and then add some code to your experiment to send data to DataPipe. You will also need to have an OSF account to store the data and create an authorization token on the OSF to allow DataPipe to write data to your OSF account. Our getting started guide has more information about how to use DataPipe….”

OSF 101: Supporting Solutions Across the Open Research Lifecycle | Aug 30, 2022 | Webinar Registration | Center for Open Science

“The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free, open-source platform that helps researchers openly and transparently collaborate and share their work throughout the entire research lifecycle. Each tool on the OSF is designed to promote the integrity of each phase of research while supporting researchers’ individual comfort levels related to sharing and accessibility. Because of its focus on research transparency and integrity, the OSF has caught the attention of institutions with open access policies, journals, and even private or government funding agencies. For new and experienced OSF users, it can often be difficult to understand just how the many tools on the OSF apply to their situation. Join us for a webinar to explore a variety of use cases highlighting how OSF can support your open science practices and solve common problems many researchers face throughout the research lifecycle….”

Creating a Campaign to Increase Open Access to Research on Climate Science and Biodiversity: A joint initiative of Creative Commons, EIFL and SPARC

Open Science No Text Logo

Open Science No Text. By: Greg Emmerich. CC BY-SA 3.0

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference, officially known as the 26th Conference of Parties, or COP26, continues in Glasgow, Scotland, I’m pleased to share some good news. The Open Society Foundations approved funding for Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL to lead a global campaign promoting open access to climate and biodiversity research. This is a promising new strategy to encourage governments, foundations, institutes, universities and environmental organizations to use “open” to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and to preserve global biodiversity. Catherine Stihler, CC’s CEO and a native of Scotland, publicly announced the campaign during her keynote at the University of St Andrews’ Power to the people event and will have the opportunity to announce the campaign at a COP26 fringe event – Open UK: Open Technology for Sustainability – on 11 November. CC is particularly happy to have the opportunity to work closely with our longtime allies in the open access movement to ensure that this effort is truly a global campaign, and hope that this initiative will help to provide a blueprint for future funding of similar collaborative campaigns.

Additional Detail

Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. The complexity of the climate crisis requires collaborative global interventions that center on equity and evidence-based mitigation practices informed by multidisciplinary research. Many researchers, governments, and global environmental organizations recognize the importance of the open sharing of research to accelerate progress, but lack cohesive strategies and mechanisms to facilitate effective knowledge sharing and collaboration across disciplinary and geographic borders. 

During the COVID-19 crisis, the power of open access to democratize knowledge sharing, accelerate discovery, promote research collaboration, and bring together the efforts of global stakeholders to tackle the pandemic took center stage. Scientists embraced the immediate, open sharing of preprints, research articles, data and code. This embrace of openness contributed to the rapid sequencing and sharing of the virus’ genome, the quick development of therapeutics, and the fastest development of effective vaccines in human history. The lessons learned during the pandemic can – and should – be applied to accelerate progress on other urgent problems facing society. 

The goal of this project is to create a truly global campaign to promote open access, open science and open data as effective enabling strategies to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. It will develop effective messaging, strategies, and tactics to empower stakeholders currently leading critical climate and biodiversity work to embed open practices and policies in their operations, and make open sharing of research the default.  

We expect to identify the most important climate and biodiversity research publications not already OA and coordinate a campaign to open those publications, remove legal and policy barriers to applying open licenses to research articles, influence key funders (governments, foundations, and institutes) of climate science and biodiversity research to adopt and implement strong OA policies, and identify opportunities to open climate and biodiversity educational resources so students, teachers and citizens can learn about these global challenges and help contribute to solutions.

We will encourage global environment organizations to adopt open licensing policies to ensure all their content is free to be reused, built upon and shared for the global public good, delivering on their SDG commitments. We will engage with researchers, universities and policy makers in the Global South to ensure inclusive outcomes throughout.

We will share additional news on this campaign as it progresses.

The post Creating a Campaign to Increase Open Access to Research on Climate Science and Biodiversity: A joint initiative of Creative Commons, EIFL and SPARC appeared first on Creative Commons.

Open-access science in the misinformation era

“While open-access science has made research available worldwide, some scholars worry that misinformation, fraud and politicization have become rampant in a system that rewards speed and sparkle….

In a widely discussed Scholarly Kitchen piece published last week, Schonfeld said that misinformation, politicization and other problems embedded in the open-access movement stem from a “mismatch” between the incentives in science and the ways in which “openness and politicization are bringing science into the public discourse.” …

While open access has democratized science, to good effect — making research available to sick patients interested in learning more about their condition or to scientists working in the Global South — it also has had “second-order effects” that are more concerning, he said.

“It’s now easier for scientific literature to be quoted and used in all sorts of political discourse,” Schonfeld said in an interview. “When the methods of scholarly publishing that we use today were first formed, there was no sense that there was going to be a kind of politicized discourse looking for opportunities to misinform the public and intentionally cause disunity.” …”

Open-access science in the misinformation era

“While open-access science has made research available worldwide, some scholars worry that misinformation, fraud and politicization have become rampant in a system that rewards speed and sparkle….

In a widely discussed Scholarly Kitchen piece published last week, Schonfeld said that misinformation, politicization and other problems embedded in the open-access movement stem from a “mismatch” between the incentives in science and the ways in which “openness and politicization are bringing science into the public discourse.” …

While open access has democratized science, to good effect — making research available to sick patients interested in learning more about their condition or to scientists working in the Global South — it also has had “second-order effects” that are more concerning, he said.

“It’s now easier for scientific literature to be quoted and used in all sorts of political discourse,” Schonfeld said in an interview. “When the methods of scholarly publishing that we use today were first formed, there was no sense that there was going to be a kind of politicized discourse looking for opportunities to misinform the public and intentionally cause disunity.” …”